Mason Cooley

If you are going to be rude, be quick about it.

— Mason Cooley

Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.

— Mason Cooley

While we are reading, we are all Don Quixote.

— Mason Cooley

My thought has been shaped by books; my desires by pictures.

— Mason Cooley

Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.

— Mason Cooley

Even in the midst of love-making, writers are working on the description.

— Mason Cooley

Every seeming equality conceals a hierarchy.

— Mason Cooley

Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are.

— Mason Cooley

I obey my own commands about as often as others do.

— Mason Cooley

Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.

— Mason Cooley

Unlike the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of language does reach a limit.

— Mason Cooley

In the museums, everything is in quotation marks.

— Mason Cooley

Contempt for others, like masturbation, is best as a secret pleasure.

— Mason Cooley

Innovation violates tradition--attacks it in public and steals from it in private.

— Mason Cooley

The eros of advertising is lurid but not specific.

— Mason Cooley

When disaster waves, I try not to wave back.

— Mason Cooley

Diplomats lie with a heavy sense of destiny.

— Mason Cooley

Sexual attraction makes the strangest bedfellows of all.

— Mason Cooley

Lack of reciprocity ruins friendships, but makes love affairs exciting for a time.

— Mason Cooley

Losing gracefully is commended but never chosen.

— Mason Cooley

Your need to talk does not create in me a need to listen.

— Mason Cooley

Successful innovations become conventions.

— Mason Cooley

Regret for wasted time is more wasted time

— Mason Cooley

Manly men and womanly women are still here but feeling nervous.

— Mason Cooley

I would be glad to worship success if I could find her.

— Mason Cooley

Few artists can afford artistic temperament.

— Mason Cooley

The absolute has moved into the fortress of the absurd.

— Mason Cooley

I am easy-going right up to the borders of my self-interest.

— Mason Cooley

Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong.

— Mason Cooley

The privacy of reading frees us to entertain the alien.

— Mason Cooley

Outside literature, high-flown sentiments are merely exasperating.

— Mason Cooley

The children of childish parents age quickly.

— Mason Cooley

When I am bored with myself, I try to find someone to listen to me.

— Mason Cooley

Habit keeps my life going, with occasional pushes from desire.

— Mason Cooley

To avoid discord, never put two wise people in the same room.

— Mason Cooley

Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues.

— Mason Cooley

I dream of summing everything up in the greatest sentence ever written.

— Mason Cooley

In the game of love, the losers are more celebrated than the winners.

— Mason Cooley

Without a little negligence, life would be intolerable.

— Mason Cooley

Change is upsetting. Repetition is tedious. Three cheers for variation!

— Mason Cooley